1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a message service of a mobile communication terminal, and in particular, to a method and apparatus for creating and reproducing an animation message, whereby written or picture-type input information input by a user through a touch screen can be created as a message, and the created message can be reproduced as an animation according to input order.
2. Description of the Related Art
Developments in wired or wireless communication technology, multimedia technology, hardware, such as Central Processing Unit (CPU) and memory, manufacturing technology, power charging technology, and the like, have reinforced mobile terminal functionality. For example, although a conventional mobile terminal is capable of delivering desired content to another party through a voice call, once transmission and reception of character messages became possible, when a voice call is impossible or when simple content needs to be delivered, the desired content can be easily delivered another party through a Short Message Service (SMS) containing the character content.
SMS has evolved to Long Message Service (LMS) containing long character content and further to Multimedia Message Service (MMS) containing a multimedia file, such as an image or a moving picture, and these developments provide more varying benefits to the user. Specifically, unlike SMS or LMS for transmitting only character content, the MMS demand for transmitting a multimedia file has been gradually increasing due to its scalability of expression. A method for transmitting desired content by using MMS will now be described.
FIG. 1 illustrates information transmission using conventional MMS.
Referring to FIG. 1, an MMS message can be edited by a user inputting desired characters in a drawing (or handwriting) recognition area and/or attaching an image. In the case of the drawing recognition area on an MMS input screen illustrated in FIG. 1, three unit recognition zones for recognizing one character at a time exist, and the user inputs desired character information by using a finger or an input tool such as a stylus pen. In addition, the user may attach an image stored in a memory by using a file attach zone located below a character input window and transmit the image.
However, presently used MMS performs transmission of only a stored image. If a sending party desires to transmit directly written content via MMS, the directly written content must be converted to an image file by using a separate program, stored, and then transmitted. Moreover, when the directly written content is converted to the image file, the image file corresponds to a sheet of a still image, so the image file does not contain sequential time information according to user writing.
That is, when a receiving party receives an MMS message, the MMS message is only shown as a sheet of still image but cannot be sequentially reproduced according to a content drawing process of the sending party, so handwriting or emotion of the sending party cannot be delivered received, thereby making the feeling of movement disappear.